Having told in the first two parts about general issues and policy issues, not without pleasure, I turn to specifics in the work of the media. I apologize for the delay in the release of this part - there were a lot of cases, and I wanted to think and formulate the material better. It turned out a lot.
In this part I will talk about where the news comes from, what the editorial staff can do with them, what topics and materials are most interesting and not interesting for readers. But I will start with another.
Before you talk about the news, you need to say a few words about the editors of the Internet media. In the comments to the first part, my colleague from Poltava wrote the following:
Unfortunately, due to advertising the site is still not fully paid off, but I think that as the site develops, it will reach the level of profitability.')
This is a site with 6 thousand hosts per day, which is not a little by regional standards, and three journalists, which can be considered an average. At the same time the site seems to be interesting. But it does not pay off ...
There are different approaches, but so far the regional online advertising market does not contribute to the emergence of projects with significant costs, so if you associate the phrase “newspaper editorial” with the
Daily Bugle of Spider-Man, I will have to disappoint you.
Starting from an office in the city center and a large staff of journalists is at least risky. I will proceed from the fact that an aspiring media manager does not have the ability to invest in the project how much significant money there is. Neither conscience nor experience allow me to call for spending a million a year on a regional project (since we ourselves follow the path of minimal costs).
Where the news comes from
You have finished cooking and are ready to start filling the site with information. Where to get it?
Here are the main sources of information:
- Press service of state and municipal institutions.
- The press service of political parties.
- Press services of commercial organizations.
- Other local online media.
- Offline media.
- Paid feeds news agencies.
- Local forums, blogs, groups in social networks.
- Your correspondents.
I'll tell you more about each of them, as well as what can be done with the information received.
Press services of state and municipal institutions
Administrations of the district, city, region, local administrations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Federal Security Service, Federal Drug Control Service, Federal Service for Supervision, Federal Tax Service, Federal Migration Service, Ministry of Emergency Situations and others. This is the main information backbone (or ballast) of most online media. Record the site addresses of all departments, departments, offices. They need to be visited daily, and some several times. After some time, you will understand how this or that press service works: when it has updates, what information it publishes.
Press releases, as a rule, can be simply copied with an indication of the source, but it is better to at least rewrite. Firstly, it is important to promote the site (more on this in the following parts, in the course of the article I will simply refer to the "promotion"), and secondly, they are often written so poorly that rewriting is simply necessary. A kind of report on the work done, for example, our local prosecutor's office - the spherical office in a vacuum. There are also opposite cases. I personally like the way the press service of the regional department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs works. Their articles are almost always published in their original form.
Some press services publish statistical information. It must somehow be processed, comprehended. You can make infographics. If it works well, it could be one of the small trumps of your media.
When we started, the information was worse. Now almost all structures have websites that regularly publish important information. Some, however, prefer e-mail to communicate with the media, but as soon as they read you, these press services will contact you. As far as I know, many of the press services report on the work by the number of uses of their materials in the media.
Here I would refer the sites of the courts. The courts work with GAS “Justice”, which reflects the movement of all cases and access to which is on the sites. Usually, the search is located in the “Judicial Records Management” section. There is no need to look for news there, but in general, from time to time you have to drop in to clarify one or another moment.
As a council, I can suggest grouping typical criminal news into one article (but not always, in the following sections), and make daily reports (for example, the number of fires) somewhere behind the main news feed.
Rareit, copy-paste, or express the opinion of the editorial board regarding the events covered - you decide. Most likely there will be situations where each of these actions is appropriate.
Political Party Press Services
I wrote about politics in the media in the past, because there will be only the news aspect of the work of the press services of political parties.
There is little interesting news. There are various statements that there is no need to rewrite or copy-paste to unbiased media. You can write an article that political party X expressed dissatisfaction with official Y, but in the article it is advisable to talk about the conflict itself, or refer to previous articles on this topic. You can ask a comment from the official Y.
In the general mass of news, these occupy an insignificant share and worthy informational occasions are rare. Most news from political parties is pure talk, which is not interesting to anyone. However, it is worth reading about the rallies and other actions held by the parties in the original source. The coverage of the meetings has its own characteristics, the main of which is counting the number of participants.
If you were not at the rally, count from the photos. Photos from the organizers of the rally may be such that it is unlikely to work out something, so look for alternative photo reports. From the photographs you determine the boundaries of the crowd, using the map, consider the area it occupies. The usual Soviet elevator, as far as I remember, has dimensions slightly more than a meter on each side. Because of the walls, which no one wants to touch, you can take it as a square meter. You estimate how many people at the rally would climb into the elevator like at a rally. So you can roughly estimate the number of protesters.
I would not recommend trusting the organizers, as well as their opponents. The truth is somewhere between these numbers. We, as far as I can tell, the police think fairly accurately, but I cannot tell you how things are going in your region.
Press services of commercial organizations
For the most part - quite boring, but still there is a certain benefit from them. First, serious companies are monitoring the media. They will see about themselves - they will be delighted, they will take your media on a pencil. Secondly, there are really important news that many may be interested. Interesting promotions of Internet providers also deserve attention, because 100% of your audience is Internet users.
I will tell you about the possible commercial component of such news in terms of income.
Other local online media
We are talking about your direct competitors and news agencies.
Technically, they can copy news from them, if the license allows. For the first couple of months we did something like this, until it came to us that all this news was a copy-paste from the sites of press services. Once or twice we had conflicts due to reprints, but this happened because of carelessness and was resolved by deleting the news.
Another thing is that claiming something, living solely by copy-paste, is problematic. But the topic of other media, as sources of information, is broader than just copying materials.
If we are talking about an event that was covered by different media, you need to get acquainted with these reports, even if you yourself were there. You never know what you missed.
Sometimes on the website of colleagues you can find the missing news from an official source.
Ask whether competitor unique reports, ask your conscience and a lawyer.
Offline media
From the point of view of
news , print media is not interesting for you. Reporting and authoring articles can be valuable for you. Try to make contact with newspapers on certain conditions.
Biased media are likely to be happy to give you the right to post their articles, but do you need it? This is a political question and this was in the last part.
More interesting is the situation with TV channels. The imputed quality of the video is that it costs a lot of money to produce. This is one of the main reasons why a successful regional TV channel is an exception to the rule. I do not know how to convince the TV channel to cooperate, but if, as in our case, he puts the stories on YouTube, it’s a sin not to use it. By the way, according to our observations, the mention of the site in the television news has almost no effect on attendance.
Cooperation with radio stations comes down to the fact that they use your website as a source for their news inserts, and in return they say at the end “news provided by an Internet newspaper ...”. We have no experience of such cooperation, but, like any other cost-effective cooperation, it is worth considering.
Local forums, blogs, groups in social networks (hereinafter all - social networks)
The largest resources should be reviewed regularly. This is a fairly important source of both information and attendance, which can work as a boomerang. You find a reason in the social network, write an article, in a social network put a link to your article, people follow the link.
Social networks are an alternative official source of information. You should not trust him unconditionally. Moral responsibility to the readers for the posted material is borne by you, and it is your reputation that is at stake, especially if the reference goes to the abstract “based on the materials of the blogs.” This, of course, is about the direct use of social networks as a source, and not about quoting some message. It looks funny to the media, which writes a “serious” article, based on speculation from some forum.
Almost any major event, if it is organized by sane people and is planned to be attended by young people, is likely to be reflected on VKontakte. From there you can gather useful information.
Paid tapes news agencies
It seems to me that if you make a regional media with a small budget from scratch, then such a source is not your choice, although who knows. We have not worked with them, so I will not invent anything. I advise you not to steal from news agencies, because it’s not worth checking how good they are.
Your correspondents.
One good journalist, free from routine affairs, is likely to be enough to compete with other electronic media. If at least once a week you will have an interesting plot or high-quality analytics, this will be a good help in the struggle for the audience.
How to choose a successful topic for the report, I will tell further.
Subject news
The general rule is to keep abreast of local events. You can even try to make some focus group of friends who would say what is interesting and what is not.
Based on our experience, I will talk about several topics of interest to people.
Local Internet News
As I already mentioned, your entire audience will consist of Internet users. This means that any more or less important event in the regional segment of the Internet is worth highlighting. Readers are most interested in news about Internet-related litigations, such as a trial for distributing unlicensed Windows through torrents.
City life
Events from the life of the city interest people. The first time we overcame the bar of a thousand hosts per day on the Day of the city. We had a great photo report about the festive parade, as well as a schedule of official events.
Information about the subsistence minimum, about changes in the work of urban transport, repair of roads and, oddly enough, about education is interesting to people.
Rallies and promotions - an interesting topic, so if possible, you need to write about them. If the action is civil (not a party rally), then your article will be discussed, i.e. at least you will receive a link and N referrals.
From the life of wonderful people ...
Significant interest is caused by news about the violation of law by law enforcement officers. The life of the authorities, namely, their income, offenses, appointments and scandals attract the attention of no less. Keep track of the annual income statements of officials.
Crime
In the criminal news and messages about the state of emergency plays an important role. If the text is good, they will be happy to read it, even if the incident itself is a cheap one.
Accident
It is not very pleasant to approach incidents from the “popular / unpopular” point of view, but this is one of the aspects of journalism.
There are a number of factors that affect the reader's interest in an accident (at the first moment, it is not yet a question of avoiding responsibility, etc.):
- Are there any dead
- Where the accident occurred (the city center is interesting, the outskirts - no)
- Features of the car (an accident involving the "Lanos" and "Nines" - not interesting, expensive foreign car or ambulance - interesting)
- Drunk driving
- Female driver
- Famous people - participants of the accident
- Law enforcement officers involved in the accident
- Is movement paralyzed
- Are there any pictures from the accident
Remember the accident in which Gref's assistant died. Of the 9 points there were seven, or even eight.
Sport
Sports stories, such as matches of the local football team, should be covered, but the effect of this will be only in the case of high-quality and interesting reports. Otherwise, fans and without you will find out the details of the match and your meager message about a goalless draw will not interest anyone, although publishing it is worth it anyway.
Yellowness
Various foul-smelling "sensations", news about maniacs, resonant accidents and other "
horse-eater " are popular. I will not touch on the issues of format and correctness, everyone decides for himself.
Maybe I missed something, but when you start working, you will quickly understand what is interesting.
But it seems to me that the most boring topics for readers are:
- Ordinary domestic crimes. “Citizen A. in a state of intoxication committed theft ...” (more serious crimes are more interesting for readers, but the matter rests on the presentation of material and yellowing)
- Current news of agriculture. "30 new tractors received a collective farm ..."
- Current news of the economy. "A subsidy from extrabudgetary funds was allocated to the modernization of regional enterprises ..."
- Current activities of power. "The regional Duma discussed the possibility of adopting a draft sketch of the sample budget for the next year"
But, keep in mind, making interesting regional news is a very non-trivial task. The bulk of the events are just domestic crimes and tractors for a collective farm.
Media files
With video all complicated. If it was not possible to agree with some local TV channel (I wrote about this in Part 2), then, with a limited budget, it is better to forget about the video. Pro photos forget harder. We, at first, did not illustrate the news with photos, but then came to the conclusion that it was inconvenient to use the site without photos.
There are five sources of photos:
- Google search / Yandex.
- Purchase in photobank.
- Press service.
- Sources of free photos.
- Your camera.
Google search / Yandex
It is illegal, therefore it is better to avoid it. If you take a photo taken by a farmer from Ohio, then most likely it will not hurt you. But the authors of the photos of your locality do not live in the distant abstract Internet, but near you and, quite likely, read your resource. It may not work out well.
Purchase in photobank
So do serious media in cases when it comes to an abstract photo, or an event where members of the media can not attend. The main problem is that it costs money, but you and I do not have any extra money. In addition, it may happen that unscrupulous owners of photobank did not verify the authorship of the photo. You can sue you.
Press Services
Some press services have photo materials attached to their news, but not all of them do this. The use of such photos is very narrow, because, as a rule, this is a photo from specific events and you will not be able to use them in the future.
Sources of free photos
First of all - Wikipedia (at least for us). Of course, as in photo banks, there may be unlicensed photos, but personally it seems to me that the risk of this is small. When using materials from Wikipedia, it is worth paying attention that the majority of photos are distributed under the Creative Commons license, which may have different requirements and should be followed.
Own camera
For us, this is the main source of photos. Of course, often the same photo is used repeatedly, but it is a necessary necessity. I constantly carry a soap box with me on which I photograph everything: police cars, garbage cans, taxis, schools, interesting signs, stray dogs. Recently scared the girl who stood at the window and, apparently, thought that I was photographing her. I was also interested in a moldy loaf of bread that lay on the grass.
Sometimes we take a decent camera and arrange a kind of photo tour around the city. We have all the main institutions (administrations, universities, administrations, etc.) and important places of the city, and, as a rule, not in one copy. This greatly simplifies the work. Very nice was our photo on "Lente.Ru."
I can advise you to stock up on money photos in different volumes and interiors (cars, envelopes, pockets, etc.). Very necessary photos.
On this, perhaps, about the news finish. I will return to the topic of filling the site in one of the following parts, where we will talk about additional (optional) sections of the Internet newspaper.
In the next part, I will talk about how to attract visitors to the media site. Initially I planned to write about incomes, but, first, revenues without visitors are difficult, and secondly, there are a few things that I would like to check before writing about them;) The following parts, like this, I do not promise quickly, I want to do the maximum.
Published parts:
Part 1.
Where to startPart 2.
What should be readyThe approximate content of the following parts:
Part 4. Promotion of the Internet newspaper. Getting started, development.
Part 5. Income online media. Banners, articles, prices, possible customers.
Part 6. What can be attached to the Internet newspaper. Add-ons, etc.